The box with the butt-plugs

Do you want the real metaphor? It's the box, with the butt-plugs, to which I pay homage in Emily's Little Trainer and Emily's Naughty Classmate. That box appears at Roissy, in Story of O. Just to refresh your memory, although I rather doubt that anyone who's still reading this blog doesn't instantly remember about the box with the butt-plugs: When they (the "they" of Roissy--the masters) find that O is too tight, back there (you know exactly where I mean), they bring out a box. Inside the box are butt-plugs of increasing size, each of which can be fitted to a belt-and-chain affair that O wears from then on, until they decide that she has been opened sufficiently for their pleasure. Story of O is the only place I've ever seen the trope in that pure, nearly miraculously piquant, form--at least until I gave fantasy-Charles an identical box (a valise, for him).

That's what training, in this sense, is about. Suddenly I pictured my life as a never ending series of widening butt-plugs, and it gave me a warm feeling inside. Opening to Charles, but, more importantly, opening to myself--or, I suppose, opening to God--was what would keep me going.

No, I didn't want to realize the metaphor; that would be stupid, and would force me into adult diapers long before my time. (Being forced into baby-diapers, though--that was something I was into, as recounted in Emily and the Shameful Customs of Prophettown.) But as a place for grounding fantasy, as a way of thinking about how to live progressively. . . it works.

Perhaps this makes sense only to the subset of submissives (already a pretty small subset of the general population) whose fantasies revolve around their anuses (proper latin plural ani, by the way), and the various things other people--Dominant people--might insert into them. For us, it feels like that violation (and it never ceases to be a violation, which is its paradoxical charm, in the true sense of "enchantment") consecrates our very existence. Stupid, I know. But there it is--and I do mean "there."

The idea that that consecrating violation might somehow progress, that it might make us more and more holy as we become more and more pleasing to the lord who uses us, lies behind the fantasy of the box with the butt-plugs. You can find that box, transformed, in countless other anal tales: most frequently, its the girl or the guy who loves anal who has a broad range of different-sized things he wants to put in his or her own or someone else's fundament. Réage's image of the box, though, rocked my world.

So the thing for me to tell as the next part of this "real" version of the story is how The Bride's Tale (which is how I originally titled Emily Orn's narrative) affected my life, and in particular my life with Charles.

Briefly, he put me in training. I said one night, after cooking dinner for Charles, which I rarely do, and adopting the formal tone I generally use to let him know I want to play, "Sir, I've been thinking a great deal about how I can be a better girl for you."

"Really," he said, putting down his fork and looking into my eyes. After due consideration, I had decided on a sort of "brat" outfit: my tightest jeans and an old white T-shirt. Underneath, unbeknown to him, I had on red lace, something I probably wear twice a year, if that. The bra was tiny and the thong rode so low on my hips that I got that lovely "bad girl" feeling every time I moved, even if I was only reaching for the wine.

I cast my eyes down to where I had put my hands in my lap. "Yes, Sir."

"And?" He was accomplished now at drawing this sort of thing out of me.

"And. . . I was thinking about Emily--you know, my great-great-grandma. . ."

He waited, patiently.

"She learned how to be a good girl for her husband, didn't she?"

I risked a glance up at him. I could tell he was intrigued. "Yes," he finally said. "It certainly seems like she did."

(This was just fucking awesome by any standard, BDSM or not, I have to say. We were talking about a fictional character I had come up with as if she were my real ancestress, and somehow a model for my conduct and possible training. It was like having a real dinner conversation about going to Jedi Academy because you'd read about Luke Skywalker.)

"I think that, irregular as it may seem, . . . you should train me the way way she was trained."

"Um." Charles said. It's what he says when I've turned him on so much he doesn't know what to do. It may be my favorite sound on earth. "Um. How do we start?"